Image: Yui Mok / PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reserved
In 1952, Conservative MP Waldron Smithers sent Prime Minister Winston Churchill a list of potentially “subversive” BBC employees. Among them was Anatol Goldberg, head of the BBC Russian service: a “Jew… who controls the selection of programmes and is a communist.” Encouraging Churchill to create a “committee presided over by an English judge or QC… who could make an extensive enquiry into communist activities”, the MP added: "we have traitors in our midst… and although I should deplore suppression of free speech they should be treated as traitors." Churchill passed Smithers’ concerns on to MI5, whose staff concluded: “In the considered view of the Security Service, communist influence in the BBC is very slight and does not constitute a serious security danger.”
If he were alive today, Waldron Smithers would have been relieved to see the footage of the BBC’s Nick Robinson grabbing an anti-war sign from a protestor and stamping on it after it “gatecrashed” his broadcast. Such images – along with the narrow ethnic, class and political make-up of the BBC – make it hard to believe that the Corporation could ever have been a breeding ground for revolutionaries. Yet such fears, over several decades, cemented a close relationship between the BBC and state security agencies. This history – little-known and rarely repeated – is central to understanding the Corporation’s role in public life today.
